“She said she liked you.” Her father made it an accusation. “Did you put her up to it? If you’ve compromised her and then forced her to prate about some affection between you to gain my approval—”
Say yes, Roddy begged the earl silently. Say you’ve compromised me. Her father was certain to knuckle under to that, even if he were mad with rage. Calling Iveragh out would only ruin her publicly. Marriage would be the only answer.
But Iveragh seemed to have lost the quick wit he’d displayed earlier. He said, quite gently, “I have forced her to nothing, Mr. Delamore. Nor will I ever.”
“Then why in God’s name would she say she liked you?” her father sputtered. “M’ daughter’s no muttonhead. She must know full well what you are.”
“I confess,” the earl said, “I am as much at a loss as yourself. Perhaps you should ask her.”
“Eh?” Mr. Delamore had subsided into a concentrated review of exactly what he remembered of Roddy’s declaration concerning Iveragh. She lifted her chin in renewed hope at the conclusion that leaped into his head. “Good God, man,” he exclaimed. “Are you in love with her?”
Roddy bit her lip in the long pause that followed, afraid that Iveragh would miss another golden opportunity. But this time the earl took his cue. In a strangely subdued voice, he said, “It’s quite possible that I am.”
Beautifully done, Roddy thought triumphantly. Just the right touch of self-doubt and conviction. Her father snapped up the bait. “Damme, if that ain’t a leveler!” He chuckled. “The little vixen. She never told me.”
“I wouldn’t have thought she knew,” the earl said dryly. “I’m sure I’ve never discussed it with her.”
Roddy’s father gave a hoot of laughter at that admission. She heard his chair scrape as he stood up. “Court her, then, by God!” he cried. “By all means, press your suit!” And for the rest of the brief visit, he continued to break into chortles of wicked amusement each time he thought of how this hardened rakehell was in love with his daughter, and didn’t even think she knew it.
Chapter 3
Roddy sat plucking at a seam on the green velvet couch in the music room while her parents poured out objections and warnings. Her father’s impetuous permission to Iveragh had been instantly dismissed by her mother as an act of insanity. Under Mrs. Delamore’s chilly stare, the joke had seemed not quite so amusing to Roddy’s father either, and now both of them joined forces to instruct Roddy on how to repulse her unwanted suitor.
“You must not let him single you out tonight before dinner, my dear,” Mrs. Delamore said. “If he approaches you, you must draw someone else into conversation immediately. Your father or I will come to your aid as quickly as we can in that instance. Now—I’ve rearranged the seating at table, so that you will be between Lord Geoffrey and the vicar. Iveragh I shall keep at my side, since your father seems so ill equipped to deal with him.”
“Matty!” Mr. Delamore exclaimed in hurt accents. “My responsibility as head of this family—”
Her mother turned a jaundiced eye upon him. “Your responsibility, my dear? Indeed yes, I would think that would include protecting your only daughter from ruin, but I see that it only extends as far as making bargain purchases of horseflesh.”
He flushed crimson. Roddy lifted her chin. “Don’t blame Papa.” She amazed herself with the calm decision she managed to put in her own voice. “I want Lord Iveragh to offer for me. I suggested it to him myself. If Papa had refused, I would have eloped.”
Two pairs of horrified eyes fixed on her as her parents absorbed this unexpected blow.
“Eloped!” her mother said in strangled accents, and promptly burst into tears.
Mr. Delamore looked as if he would have liked to do the same. Roddy bit her lip, dismayed at the hurt she had never meant to cause. She had thought they would be glad to have her gone. Her gift gave her no divine omniscience: there were levels and levels in the quicksilver shift of mind and emotion, but right now there was only anguished disbelief. “Mama,” she said, and all the steadiness had left her voice. “Don’t cry. Of course I won’t elope—not now. But you must understand I want to be married. You and Papa can’t look after me forever. I need a family of my own. All my happiness depends on it.”
Mrs. Delamore buried her nose in her handkerchief. “We can look after you forever,” she cried in a muffled tone. “We want to!”
Roddy squeezed her hands together in distress. “Oh, Mama!” How could she say that a lifetime of unfulfillment in her parents’ home stretched like bleak winter before her? She was a burden to them, however loving their intentions. A burden to anyone who knew of her talent. They loved her as they would have loved a unicorn in their midst. Careful of the magic. Of the sharp and certain truth.
And yet she was human, her needs and fears the same as theirs. She was not different. Not in her heart. She longed to be useful and necessary for her own sake. Not like Aunt Nell, sheltered and protected, imprisoned in her indulgent family for all of her life.
“Iveragh.” Roddy’s mother could barely speak past the sob in her throat. “The things they say of him—”
A multitude of sins were rumbling about her mother’s mind, too incoherent for Roddy to catch more than a flash of mistresses and duels and dishonored maidens. Roddy frowned, remembering Lord Iveragh’s face in the moonlight, and how quickly it had changed from despair to cold pride. “Mama,” she said with gentle firmness, “I of all people should know that what people say isn’t always the whole truth.”
Her father looked up from where he had been breaking a quill into fragments at the writing desk. He stared at Roddy a moment. “Do you know the whole truth in this case?” he asked suddenly.
It was Iveragh’s declaration of love that he meant. She met his eyes and committed herself beyond recall. “Yes,” she lied. “Yes, Papa, I do know it.”
Her mother made a pitiful sound of protest. Her father narrowed his eyes. “And have you told him the whole truth, miss?”
It took all of her determination to keep her face raised to her father’s. “He understands everything.”
Not exactly a lie. She didn’t dare admit that her gift had failed with Iveragh, for she knew her only hope was to convince her parents that she had seen some redeeming quality in him that everyone else had missed. Lord Iveragh knew all he needed to know. With him, she was a normal person instead of a freak, and she saw no reason ever to let him think otherwise. For that one virtue she was willing to excuse him any number of indiscretions.
“Everything, Papa,” she repeated, with extra firmness.
Her father’s lips tightened. He stared down at the desk and struggled. The decision shifted and wavered in his mind, tossed one way and then another. He’d spoken to Geoffrey, quizzed the younger man mercilessly, and received not only anxious reassurance, but a written letter of recommendation as well. “A man of integrity,” that letter had said. “A noble friend.” There was no mention of Iveragh’s reputation, Iveragh’s insolvency. Nothing but Geoffrey’s high-flown phrases of assurance and commendation.
Her father thought of the look on Iveragh’s face as he made his offer. Pride and hard truth, with no sly insinuations. Not a simpering dandy with a weakness for the card table: no one had accused the earl of that vice. And only just come into his inheritance—at thirty-five, by God, long after a man ought to be allowed control of his own affairs. Found it ruined—some nitwit trustee, no doubt. A shame, a damned shame, ill luck that any man might have. But my daughter…my daughter…my precious curse. Our poisoned blood. Nell and Jane. Oh, God…Nell and Jane. A wasted life and a broken one.
He looked up, and Roddy saw herself then as her father saw her. Against the background of dull velvet and leaden sky, she was a fragile, golden fairy-creature: all hope and future promise, innocent and wise and utterly confounding. His joy and his burden. It was beyond him, the right answer, and he knew it.
I love you, he thought, in helpless silence. Let it be as you want.
&n
bsp; Roddy slowly let out the breath she’d been holding.
Mr. Delamore rose from behind the desk. He rested his hand on her mother’s shoulder and looked down at her huddled form. “Come, my dear,” he said softly. “We cannot keep our bird in the nest if she wants to be free.” He stroked her hair, the shining blond that was paling to gray. “Let us give her this chance at happiness with good grace.”
Her mother only wept harder, and hot tears pricked behind Roddy’s eyes. “Papa—” she said brokenly, hardly knowing how to put it into words the warmth and misery in her heart.
Mrs. Delamore wiped inelegantly at her eyes. She crossed to Roddy and sank down beside her, pulling her close. Neither spoke—there was no need. Roddy knew clearly how much her mother wished her happy, and how much Mrs. Delamore feared for her only daughter’s future. There was no need to look deeper, to the tiny place that might wish Roddy well and gone. A long time it had been since that day in Mama’s bedroom. Long enough to forget.
If a lifetime was long enough.
“Don’t worry, Mama,” Roddy whispered at last. “I know this is what I should do.”
Her mother made a small sound, and stood up as quickly as she had sat down. She walked from the room without a word.
Roddy’s father cleared his throat. He spread his hands self-consciously. “You’ve grown up too fast for us, you see.”
Roddy stood up. Stifling a sniff, she reached on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “Best of my friends. I love you, Papa. I shall love you both forever.”
No more was said of shunning Lord Iveragh. If her parents were not enthusiastic, they were at least silent on the subject. That was guilt, that silence. It was fear. Beneath the rush of unhappy objections there was a tiny, tiny flame. A faint breath of relief. With Roddy gone, their lives would be different.
Easier.
She closed her mind to that hurt and threw herself into impossible dreams of the future.
For the dinner party, Roddy’s maid helped her dress carefully in her newest gown, with its bodice of pink-and silver-shot India gauze and white mull skirt embroidered with bouquets of the same dreamlike colors. The dress fell softly from the ribbon tied beneath her small breasts, trailing behind her as she walked. She twirled in front of the glass, so that the pearls which rested on the pale skin below her throat shimmered with reflected candlelight. Her bright hair gleamed with its own luster, framing her wide gray eyes with wispy curls.
No stablehand tonight.
No beauty, either. She knew there was a way about her; an aura that caught and held attention. She knew what she was not. Not pretty. Not sweet. Not delicate. She was not a daisy on a summer day, but instead the wind that blew it. People looked at Roddy the way they would look at a blue rolling storm on the horizon. And when she looked back, they faltered and turned away.
Down the curved stairs she went alone, past the high walls lined with Delamore stallions in gilded frames, one above the other, a century and a half of breeding blood and bone and the will to run. The moment she entered the drawing room, she felt her mother’s unhappy protest over the dress. But the vicar had already arrived, and Lady Elizabeth was just stalking ponderously through the front hall in the footman’s wake, so no word was said about the low neckline and slender silhouette of the India-gauze gown. Just behind Lady Elizabeth, Lord Geoffrey’s party disembarked from their carriage.
Roddy watched from the door, first Lady Mary and then tall Geoffrey, and then a blankness, the sweep of a black cloak behind them. Iveragh. Her heart did a curious little half-beat. He always seemed to have that effect: that when she saw him she was so intent on deciphering his thoughts that no one else’s intruded on her consciousness at all. It would have been a relief, except the uncertainty was as nerve-racking as knowing too much.
Lord Iveragh in evening dress was at his most elegant and intimidating yet. Roddy found herself staring at the rose-patterned carpet on the drawing-room floor, just as people did when they spoke to her, afraid that if she raised her eyes she would meet his. That possibility sent her heart into the greatest agitation. He was here; he had her father’s permission to address her, and suddenly she could think of nothing more frightening than the idea of marriage to a total stranger.
He made no move toward her. He lingered near the door, talking horses with her father. Roddy carried on a distracted conversation with the vicar, who thought she was painfully shy.
As Roddy listened with half an ear to the vicar’s description of his fall garden, she let her gaze drift over Geoffrey’s lean figure clad in brown satin. She wanted to smile at him and look him in the eyes, but he would not let her.
Roddy had noticed that evasiveness more and more over the past few years. It had been the first real hint that she could expect nothing from him. Like Great-aunt Jane’s husband, Geoffrey had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the witchy gray eyes of a Delamore female. He was more happily occupied now with a warm perusal of the parlormaid’s swelling bust as she leaned over to relight a candle that had sputtered out on the table next to him. When she straightened up, he gave her a smile and a half-wink, and the images in his head would have made her blush twice as pink if she could have read them as Roddy did.
Roddy watched the small exchange with resigned exasperation. Though Geoffrey loved his wife with a commendably rarified sentiment, as far as Roddy could tell he’d never felt an instant’s remorse for keeping up his lady-killing ways as a married man. It was one more reason, Roddy knew, to be sure that he and she could never have suited. Women were the one thing which seemed to Roddy to have fallen through a particularly large crack in Geoffrey’s moral platform. In fact, it had been the chief despair of her young life that she herself was the single female whom he considered in a completely sisterly light. Beneath his honest charm and modesty, Geoffrey was the closest thing to a libertine that Roddy personally knew.
“And what do you think of the Irish question, my lord?” The vicar addressed Geoffrey politely, when the blushing maid had departed.
Geoffrey forgot the buxom Yorkshire girl immediately. “The Irish question?” He spoke with a calm courtesy that was completely feigned. The subject brought a turmoil of excitement to his mind, but to Roddy’s confusion it seemed to have more to do with the revolutionary government of France than with Ireland. Representation, he was thinking, and human rights, topics dear to his philosopher’s heart. They were subjects which never failed to give Roddy a headache when she tried to follow his reasoning.
“Have you had trouble with the malcontents on your estate?” the vicar pursued. “I understand there’ve been most savage acts perpetrated on innocent people.”
“No.” Geoffrey smiled, his golden eyes cold. United Irishmen flitted in and out of his head before he spoke again. “We haven’t had the least sign of unrest. But then, I try to treat my tenants liberally. Not all landlords agree with that approach.”
“I heard that somewhere in Ulster a squire was found impaled on a pike made by his own smith.” The vicar envisioned that discovery with a gleeful shiver. “The culprits were tarred and hanged, I do believe, and good work of it, if I say—”
“How long have you known Lord Iveragh, my lord?” Roddy interrupted.
She had meant the question only to change the subject and stem the rising tide of Geoffrey’s fury at the vicar. The instant jumble of memories that tumbled through Geoffrey’s mind was unexpected, so vivid and various that she could make nothing of them. But out of the multitude, one vision dominated—a strange, distorted memory of water flashing, choking…panic and then deliverance: a bruising grip and a boy’s face very close, strained in desperate effort beneath streaming dark hair.
“Since our school days,” Geoffrey said, glancing at her and then away. To Roddy’s surprise, it was a subject that made him vastly more uncomfortable than Irish politics. He didn’t even want to think of it, but his attempts to concentrate on something else did not hide from Roddy the knowledge that he knew Iveragh had come to Yorkshire with the
purpose of courting Roddy. It embarrassed Geoffrey to have brought his friend for such a purpose, and in some way that wasn’t clear to Roddy, it violated his rigid moral principles. But whether the unease had to do with Iveragh’s reputation or some twist of Geoffrey’s own, she could not tell.
“Oh,” Roddy said, putting mild surprise in her tone. “I wonder that you’ve never mentioned him before.”
A single word roared through Geoffrey’s mind—a blast of wind that came and vanished. He shifted in his chair, focusing on the pearls that gleamed at Roddy’s throat. But she had caught it, that single word, and suddenly she wished she hadn’t.
Murder.
Plain and unvarnished. She stared at Geoffrey, willing an explanation, but he was concentrating heroically on his wife now, thinking of her pregnancy and her clearness to him, subjects guaranteed to chase everything else from his mind.
She sat back. It had shaken her.
Iveragh a murderer?
No. Geoffrey’s scruples would never allow him to bring a murderer into their house and allow the man to court the daughter of one of Geoffrey’s oldest friends. Murderers were ragged outcasts, not elegant Irish peers. Murderers were hanged, by honest gentlemen like Geoffrey.
And a gentleman’s way to commit homicide was on the field of honor.
Roddy frowned.
It made little sense. Geoffrey had no disgust of dueling, as long as his strict code of ethics was upheld. In fact, Roddy well knew that he would not hesitate at violence when his principles were at stake. He was a man of action as well as pen, though one might not think it to see his aristocratic figure disposed as it was now in a prim shield-back chair.
No—an honest duel would not affect Geoffrey so. Perhaps it had been a dishonest one.
She glanced up for the first time toward the dark figure that dominated the far side of the room. As tall as her father, and more perfectly built, Lord Iveragh stood with his head bent attentively to Lady Elizabeth’s desultory conversation. He appeared to be fascinated by every phrase that dripped from that lady’s rouged lips, nodding occasionally, and even smiling once. It was just as that unexpected expression touched his hard mouth that he raised his eyes and looked straight at Roddy.
The Regency Romances Page 84